The Foreigners (23 page)

At first, she felt queasy. She was holding her breath, trying not to smell things. She had sought out a place as far away as possible from her usual stomping ground, so she wouldn't have to run into anyone she knew. This neighborhood was literally outside the city. She'd also taken the extra precaution of wearing a wig, sleek, black, shoulder-length, with bangs.

At first, she kept her distance from the other women there. But she couldn't help overhearing their conversations, and then following them from day to day. One woman in particular narrated things very well.

The day she'd hired her, the owner, Juana, had asked, “What do you do?”

“Makeup and hands,” she'd said.

There wasn't much makeup work, so she began with hands. She did her first few pairs with repugnance, holding her breath. Then one day she worked a miracle on a pair of fingernails, making these ugly things—they'd been a particularly ugly pair, long, dirty, cracked—beautiful. Okay, she thought, think of it that way. The work required confronting ugliness, making it beautiful. This was something she could understand.

Another day a woman came in with her daughter. It was the daughter's fifteenth birthday. They both needed makeup. Juana called her over.

She was nervous, but everything she put on the girl made her look so pretty that she gained confidence. Next she did the mother. Everyone in the beauty parlor exclaimed at her skill. “Now we don't even know who's the mother and who's the daughter,” they said. One of the girls working there was going out on an important date that night. “Hey, can you make me up?” she asked.

Going home on the bus that night, Isolde felt so happy she wanted to shout. Then she caught herself and felt strange, as if she must be living in a warped world. Could that really make her so happy, to put makeup on a working girl in a remote, shitty corner of a Third World city? She shrugged. Well, it had. The feeling was there, solid, in her stomach.

It is said that monkeys are drawn instinctively to hair. The pleasure that the touch of hair affords them is such that they seek it from any source, the dead as well as the living, strangers as well as their own kind. Any hairy object, animate or inanimate, may form the subject of their investigations. The pleasure is the pleasure of the fingers. The specific life of the hand begins with grooming.

Her entire life Isolde had had a horror of hair. Everyone in her family knew this. A hair on the sink, on the table, not to mention on the food. When she had been little and came across a hair in an unexpected place, she would start to cry. Sometimes she would even cry for a long time. To avoid these scenarios, her family would whisk any loose hairs away as soon as they appeared.

One day, Juana came over as Isolde was working on someone's feet. “We're going to have to teach you to wax,” she said. Isolde's face must have betrayed something. “The way we work here is that we all know how to do everything,” Juana said. But still she didn't press Isolde right away.

The next few nights, lying in bed, Isolde thought about hairs, meshes of them, creeping, crawling over everything. Dark or pale, white blond against pink skin or reddening at the roots. Hairs that had been dyed and were growing out white. Patches of flesh overgrown with hairs. She felt suffocated, pictured hair growing inside her throat, like a thicket, prickly, blocking the whole passage, encroaching on her tongue.

While before she'd avoided even looking at the activities in the beauty parlor that had to do with hair, now she began to pay quiet attention. She knew she had to conquer this fear of hair. She began sweeping up the hair left on the floor after a cut. She'd been amazed that the other women could eat their lunches in this place so full of hair. She'd always step outside to eat herself, sitting on the bench right by the front door. One day, she made herself eat inside with them. She had to learn to be around hair.

That same af ternoon, Juana asked her to wash a woman's hair before a cut. It gave Isolde goose bumps, but she managed it. Soon afterward, Vera said one morning when Isolde arrived, “Today I'm going to teach you how to wax.”A few hours later, a young woman came in. She had tawny skin and hair almost the same color. “Come on,” Vera said, waving her hand at Isolde with an impish smile. Isolde went into the little back room with Vera and the woman. Vera explained how to heat and stir the wax. She let Isolde stir, waiting for the moment when the wax was liquified but not transparent. Vera spread wax on the woman's leg and then tapped it with a wooden spatula. Once it was hard, but not too dry, she tore it off. The woman cried out. Her skin was left rosy and uncannily smooth.

The mechanics of waxing were not foreign to Isolde. She did know, after all, how to wax herself. But she still wasn't prepared for the first client she had, a dark-haired woman with lots of hair, not only on her legs and in her armpits, but everywhere, even on the fleshy curves of her butt. She had never seen so much hair on a woman in her life.

Isolde plunged in. Unlike the first woman, who had cried out, this woman was used to the treatment. She made little grunts, nothing more, as the hair was ripped out. Isolde was sweating, she kept working. Whichever way the woman turned, there seemed to be more hair. Vera checked in on her every ten minutes.

Finally, once it was over and the woman had left, Isolde sat down, flushed and exhausted. Juana brought out a bottle of champagne. “To celebrate your first waxing,” she said.

Over time, Isolde actually began to find the waxing satisfying. It even felt like a way for her to actively engage her lifelong horror of hair. Through actions of her own, she could confront and conquer it. She delighted in the smooth, clean surface of the skin afterward. The wonder of the wax, the hairs suddenly all gone.

It was also strangely satisfying to get up every day and have something particular to do, somewhere to go, rather than have the whole day there, shapeless, looming before her. She was less lonely. She was in the company of people all day, listening to chatter, hearing stories. It helped that her clientele weren't the kind of people she knew. They were from the province of Buenos Aires, Avellaneda.

She still went to cocktail parties in the evenings. Of course, she could get any kind of beauty treatment done now for free. If anything, her look was now even sleeker, with the constant touch-ups. She received offers for dates, went on dates. She still handed out her card at cocktail parties, though less frequently.

 

 

A t first, I only knew that Isolde called me less. I called her myself, to find out if everything was all right. When I did see her, she seemed different. I wasn't sure if this was good or bad, but I did notice that I felt more relaxed around her. She was less bubbly. You didn't feel you had to muster the same energy.

Then it happened. One day at the beauty parlor, I noticed a new woman working. I saw the back of her head, shiny black shoulder-length hair. She turned. I saw only a sliver of her face, but I recognized her movement. Then she stood up and walked away. The walk. It was dizzying—it could only be Isolde.

But I held back my impulse to call out her name. Something was obviously going on. She was here in disguise, didn't want to be discovered. I followed Vera into the little back room.

“There's a new girl?” I asked.

“Yeah, an Austrian,” Vera said. “At first, she didn't speak at all. She was very cold. But she learned quickly. She has a certain touch, and a stylish look, which Juana likes.” Vera smiled. “Now she's changing, loosening up a little bit.”

The black hair actually looked great on Isolde, giving her a different air of sophistication.

When I came out of the waxing room, black-haired Isolde was coming right toward me, leading a woman to the pedicure area. We made eye contact. There was no way to avoid it. She started.

“Hey,” I said, softly.

She put her finger to her lips. I nodded. I was getting a pedicure with Vera. It was near the end of the day. When I finished and stood up to pay, Isolde walked by me again. “Wait for me in the café at the end of the block,” she whispered.

I did as she'd said. About twenty minutes later, she came in. This had been her nightmare, being discovered. But now that it had happened, she was matter-of-fact. She sat down and took her wig off. Her blond hair was pulled back tight in a ponytail, then looped up at the base of her neck. She pulled off the ponytail holder and shook it out. Watching her, I admired her practicality.

“So,” she said, “what are you doing all the way out here?”

I told her about the first day I'd come to look at the Riachuelo and how I'd met Vera.

“Now I come back to see her,” I said.

“Yeah, she's nice,” Isolde answered. “She tells good stories.”

She seemed a bit tired. Her nails were freshly done. She looked up at me and smiled. Suddenly, the voice was back, melodious, the accent. “There's an opening at Benzacar tonight, a new artist, should be interesting. Would you like to join me?”

“Sure, why not?” I said, both impressed and thrown, not least by the trace of irony in her eyes.

She glanced at what I was wearing. “If you come home with me now, you can borrow some clothes.”

I looked down at what I was wearing, an outfit that up to then had seemed perfectly fine to me. “Okay,” I agreed.

Night fell rapidly. Leonarda and I were prowling around. I flashed my teeth at her in the dark.

“I think it's time to tell you,” I said.

“Tell me what?”

“What I'm doing here.”

“What do you mean, what you're doing here?”

“Well, I actually work in intelligence,” I said.

“Ha-ha. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And that's coming from someone stupid.”

“Think about it. Why else would I be here?” I countered.

This seemed to hit home. Her weak spot, the national inferiority complex. Why would anyone come to Argentina?

Cars were whizzing by us, shaking up the flowering trees. Just then my cell phone beeped, indicating it was low on battery.

“What's that?” She glanced around quickly. Miss Techie to boot. It was almost like a caricature. That's right, of course, I thought, she's pathologically paranoid.

“No, nothing,” I said.

I laughed. In that moment, I remembered something else that Canetti says, this time about laughter. “A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall that arouses laughter does so because it suggests helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. We laugh instead of eating it.”

 

 

I was working to destabilize her in one way or another.

She hadn't lasted long living at the guy's place, which wasn't to say that she was through with him. She'd found lodging in a house with several other young women. “Come visit me,” she said. “I have the cutest little room.”

I timed it so that I was on my way out for the evening. I was meeting up with Pablo, the guy I'd met that night in the bar with Gabriel.

“Can I take a shower?” I asked. I took a shower in the little bathroom off her room. I came back out. “Do you have anything lacy?”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Just to look nice. I have a meeting.”

She stood, opened a drawer, looked through her clothes. She was clearly unhappy and not adept at hiding it.

I tried on one negligee after another and finally decided on a purple one.

“You like that one?” she said. “Good. Let's go.”

“What do you mean?” I laughed.

“Let's go, I'm going with you.” She gripped the back of my neck with her hand.

I shrugged her off, laughing, started putting eyeliner on in the mirror. “I wish I could bring you,” I said. “But I can't.”

That encounter gave me an idea. Her place was centrally located. At every possible opportunity, whether she was there or not, I would stop by on my way out for the evening. I would use her bathroom. I would pee or take a shower, drying off with her towel. My excuse was always that the water wasn't working at my place. I would use her deodorant, her perfume. Or if I had perfume with me, I would spray it around. Once I even touched myself and left a snail trail on her washcloth.

Silly as they might sound, these gestures were satisfying me. With each one, I wriggled freer from the trap.

Her bras didn't fit me, but once I borrowed some underwear, leaving a pair of mine in her dirty-clothes basket. I left a trace of lipstick on the sheet. A few blond hairs in her hairbrush, contrasting markedly with her dark ones. I shaved my armpits with her razor.

The idea was to scatter pheromones around. I kept a litany in my head of the substances containing pheromones: snail trail, spit, snot, perfume, sweat, pee.

If she was there, I would lie back on the bed, stretch my arms out, baring my armpits.

“This guy I'm meeting tonight is a writer, quite good, I think. At least, he has original ideas.”

Sometimes I would actually be meeting someone—I had picked up the habit of going to that bar and occasionally going home with someone. At other times, as in this case, it was a lie.

“What do you know about original ideas?” she snapped.

What mattered was that I had captured her attention in a new way. Her energy, usually so diversified, was caught and she with it, here in this little cage of a room. The key, of course, was that I had somewhere to go. I had no delusions, the whole situation was predicated on that. If I was fleeing, she had no need to.